JHU Doctor Concerned About Patient Access to Quality Care

A pediatric oncologist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, David Loeb, M.D., Ph.D., shares his story about a 19-year-old patient with cancer whose family and team of doctors fought with the insurance company to get her PET scans covered. He asserts that insurers must defer issues of medical necessity to physicians on the front lines who know the particulars of their patients' cases better than anyone else and who are much more familiar with the medical literature to the determine which tests are medically necessary and which are not. This video was shown during the Society of Nuclear Medicine (SNM) 2010 Annual Meeting Press Conference, held Monday, June 7 in Salt Lake City, Utah. For more information, visit www.snm.org/2010Press.

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Nonprofits & Activism

Tags:

• SNM
• nuclear medicine
• PET scan
• PET/CT
• cancer
• pediatric
• health care
• insurance coverage
• imaging